Suppose your professor has given you an assignment to find an article discussing the ethics of cloning. Your first step is to determine your KEY TERMS. In this case they are CLONING and ETHICS.
If you perform a search for CLONING you would retrieve over 101,000 results as seen below. This is more than you could reasonably evaluate and chances are most of the results will not be on you topic.
Use AND to narrow your results. This time search CLONING AND ETHICS. Notice your results have dropped to 9,871 and they will be more focused on your topic. You could further narrow your results by adding more KEY TERMS such as HUMANS or ANIMALS if you wanted to be more specific.
Now let’s refine your results even further. In the left side menu find the SEARCH WITHIN RESULTS options. From here you can limit your results to ONLY FULL TEXT results, ONLY PEER REVIEWED results, or MUST HAVE IMAGES.
Select ONLY FULL TEXT to limit your results to only those results where the full article is included.
You are now down to 9,514 results.
You can also limit your results to a certain time period. In this case we will limit our results to the last five years. Click on CUSTOM DATE RANGE in the bottom of the left hand menu to access the date range function. Use the pop-up calendar to limit your results to 01/01/2010-today.
You are now down to 6,218 results which are focused on your topic, available in FULL TEXT, and were published between 2010 and 2015.
